Weight loss: How just the SMELL of food could be making you gain weight

WEIGHT LOSS could be affected just by having a good sense of smell, a new study has found.

Sticking to a diet can be hard, especially when surrounded by high fat and high sugar foods.

However, a recent study has now found that just having a good sense of smell could affecting any weight loss.

Being able to smell the food before eating it could increase weight independently.

It’s not great news for bacon lovers.

The study by the University of California, Berkeley, found the connection when testing mice and their metabolism.

Researchers discovered that there is a connection between what can be smelt and how the body then burns calories.

The mice that could smell the food stored the fat, yet those who couldn’t burned it off.

Céline Riera, one of the researchers on the team, confirmed: “This paper is one of the first studies that really shows if we manipulate olfactory inputs we can actually alter how the brain perceives energy balance, and how the brain regulates energy balance.”

Another researcher Andrew Dillin stated: “We actually made mice get fat and then blocked their sense of smell. And what we found that they had lost weight almost immediately. The weight that they lost wasn’t muscle mass, not bone mass, only fat mass.

“Weight gain isn’t purely a measure of the calories taken in; it’s also related to how those calories are perceived.”

The next step in the study is to see if it correlates with humans and could be key to helping weight loss.

He continued: “If we can validate this in humans, perhaps we can actually make a drug that doesn’t interfere with smell but still blocks that metabolic circuitry. That would be amazing.”